Berkeley: Cha-Ya slices and dices its way to vegan delight

Carol Ness, Chronicle Staff Writer

Published 4:00 am, Friday, August 12, 2005

Photo: CHRISTINA KOCI HERNANDEZ

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CHRISTINA KOCI HERNANDEZ/CHRONICLE for a restaurant revu, foto of Cha Ya restaurant in Berkeley. this is a japanese vegetarian place, small, and there's always a line after about 6p. would be nice to catch that if poss, or some of the very pretty dishes. less

CHRISTINA KOCI HERNANDEZ/CHRONICLE for a restaurant revu, foto of Cha Ya restaurant in Berkeley. this is a japanese vegetarian place, small, and there's always a line after about 6p. would be nice to catch that ... more

Photo: CHRISTINA KOCI HERNANDEZ

Berkeley: Cha-Ya slices and dices its way to vegan delight

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Atsushi Katsumata wields a knife with such skill that he is licensed to cut the potentially lethal blowfish in his native Japan. At Cha-Ya, his busy North Berkeley restaurant, diners' lives don't depend on his precision.

But it's there, in everything from the cut of the carrot flowers, daikon and shiitakes atop the cheerful soba salad, to the design of the seaweed, mushrooms and other vegetables floating on a bowl of udon and broth.

Cha-Ya serves no blowfish. It serves no fish at all. The long Japanese menu is 100 percent vegan. At its best, the cooking here is clean-tasting, light and satisfying, as well as artful. It's a vegetarian's dream, but won't leave meat eaters yearning for flesh.

The restaurant sits squarely in the Gourmet Ghetto, but it's not fancy --

there are just 21 seats at Formica tables and a counter. It has a neighborhood, jeans-and-T-shirt feel.

The food isn't fancy, either, but it combines humble ingredients in ways that are both familiar and inventive -- and that venture far beyond what most dime-a-dozen sushi and noodle places do. The only consistent flaw is a tendency toward too much sweetness in some sauces.

Every night, from about 6 p.m. on, there's a line out the door. The place is so popular that Katsumata is looking to open a second location in San Francisco. At one time, he owned three restaurants in the city, but sold them in the late 1980s and worked as a sushi chef at the Hotel Nikko to cut his work time while his kids grew up. He opened Cha-Ya in Berkeley five years ago.

Cha-Ya's menu is varied, but uses no vegetable-based faux animal proteins. Tofu, however, is a mainstay. Tender cubes lurk in the miso soup. Atsuage tofu, firm and golden-fried, sits on seasoned rice as one of the nigiri sushi choices. Tofu pureed with tahini dresses shira ae, a blanched spinach salad.

Vegetables come raw, blanched, broiled and grilled, wrapped in rice or floating in broth, plain or sauced with a sweet-sour tamarind glaze or maybe a creamy sesame dressing. Sprinkled amid the classic shiitakes and wakame are seasonal broccolini and green beans.

Sushi comes as nigiri, hosomaki (small rolls) and some large rolls. The house special Cha-Ya roll ($6.75) is wild. Seasoned rice is wrapped around green avocado, orange carrot and ivory yam and the entire fat roll is dunked in tempura batter and deep fried, then sweet rice wine and ginger sauce. Crunchy on the outside, cool and clean on the inside, it's sheer entertainment -- and good.

Nigiri ($3.25 to $3.50 for two pieces) are topped with everything from asparagus to sea vegetable salad. The shiitake version comes with two fat pieces of broiled mushroom topped by a tiny sprig of broccolini, tied to a rice raft by a sash of nori. It's pretty and well-seasoned -- a great version.

Hosomaki (small rolls, $3.50-$4 for six pieces) come in 13 flavors, from familiar avocado or cucumber to the more powerful natto (fermented soybeans) and yamaguro (pickled burdock), which delivered a good spicy sweetness.

Udon and soba -- 11 kinds -- are served in hot or cold versions, in a simple broth or curry soup, or in a salad. The kinoko ($8) mushroom soup version is earthy, nuanced and balanced, with tiny enoki, meaty portobello strips and tender shimeji among the half-dozen fungi fanned out over the top of the well-cooked noodles and clear broth, which gets its marine tang from seaweed instead of dashi.

One night, the summer heat lingered and we headed for the salads, artworks all. The soba salad ($5.50) bursts with the colors and fresh flavors of a dozen or so vegetables sliced and arranged on top of the noodles, perked up by a sesame oil vinaigrette.

Sunomono ($4.25) brings a scattering of golden raisins on silver noodles and wakame in a different vinaigrette; interesting sweet and crunchy jolts, but the flavors didn't mesh. Shira ae ($5), blanched spinach salad, is irresistibly creamy and sesame-nutty.

On another day, the fog had blown in and the hot dishes had sudden appeal. Some were better than others.

The moon garden ($7.50) is a tofu version of chawanmushi, the silky egg custard steamed with meats and treats inside. The dense, creamy tofu custard hides kabocha, mushrooms and gingko nuts; eating it is like diving for buried treasure and coming up with the gold.

The taku-sui ($7), potstickers in broth with a lovely citrus-ponzu sauce, taste good but the dumplings disintegrate messily in their hot bath.

One night a special was hasami age ($6.50), a great example of Katsumata's imagination. Corn is cut off its cob in strips; pressed tofu is sandwiched between two strips and they're wrapped in a soybean sheet and seaweed, and then tempura-fried. Cut across, looks like a tempura corn cob -- adorable, though it would have been bland without the tangy sweet sauce.

In the dengaku ($7.50), a miso-glazed rectangle of tofu, sprinkled with sesame seeds, is creamy and works well, though the sauce is a bit sweet. But the broiled eggplant was underdone and unseasoned -- something we'd also noticed with the robata yaki ($4.50), broiled vegetables on skewers.

The dengaku glaze was a good example of the kitchen's heavy hand with the sugar in some of the sauces, which showed up in the hasami age and Cha-Ya roll sauces too.

Desserts ($4) are super sweet. Chewy mochi in azuki beans was my favorite, although it's a sugar bomb. The same azuki sauce sends ripe pineapple chunks off the sweetness scale. I ended up wishing I'd tried the vegan chocolate cake.

Overall, though, the misses were few. Service is efficient and friendly, though dishes tend to arrive all at once.

Every meal at Cha-Ya left me full and happy, but not weighted down. You can eat here again and again and never leave with the need to head straight for a comfy horizontal surface.

Cha-Ya
1686 Shattuck Ave. (near Virginia Street), Berkeley; (510) 981-1213.
Lunch noon-2 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday; dinner 5-9:30 p.m. Sunday-Thursday,
until 10 p.m. Friday-Saturday. Wine and beer. No reservations. Credit cards
accepted. Fairly easy street parking; free lot in back at night..
Overall: TWO STARS
Food: TWO STARS
Service: TWO STARS
Atmosphere: ONE AND A HALF STARS
Prices: $$
Noise Rating: TWO BELLS.
Pluses: Artful, interesting Japanese vegan menu; very fresh, clean flavors.Unpretentious.
Minuses: Theres always a wait to get in; some dishes miss the mark.
RATINGS KEY
FOUR STARS: Extraordinary
THREE STARS: Excellent
TWO STARS: Good
ONE STAR: Fair
(box): Poor .
($) Inexpensive: entrees $10 and under
($$) Moderate: $11-$17
($$$) Expensive: $18-$24
($$$$) Very Expensive: more than $25
Prices area based on main courses. When entrees fall between these
categories, the prices of appetizers help determine the dollar ratings. .
ONE BELL: Pleasantly quiet (under 65 decibels)
TWO BELLS: Can talk easily (65-70)
THREE BELLS: Talking normally gets difficult (70-75)
FOUR BELLS: Can only talk in raised voices (75-80)
BOMB: Too noisy for normal conversation (80+) .
Chronicle critics make every attempt to remain anonymous.
All meals are paid for by the Chronicle.
Star ratings are based on a minimum of three visits.
Ratings are updated continually based on a least one revisit.